Open space wasted
I am not an architect. I am a victim of architecture.
Students at Cal State Long Beach have to
walk excessive distances between classes because the designers of the campus
have placed "esthetics" above practicality when designing the school.
Jason Kosareff
Students have to traverse vast, useless
spaces just because someone felt trees needed to dot the campus. Trees
do add to a campus, but they don't take up that much room.
A few open spaces are a nice thing, but
this campus takes the use of space to excess. A campus should be designed
to facilitate student access to classes. That's what we are here for.
Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles is
a good case in point. It is designed to allow businessmen and women, secretaries,
clerks and management to interact with great ease. Everything and everyone
is at their fingertips.
If all communities were designed like Bunker
Hill, particularly poor communities, it would allow the people to build
strong political movements and develop an economic culture that would shield
them from predatory exploitations of the workers.
Urban sprawl fosters the exact opposite
kind of society. Campus sprawl is a microcosm version of the same phenomenon.
The distance across campus alienates departments from one another.
Spaces between the buildings on campus
are ridiculously exaggerated. On a campus this size, erecting buildings
a quarter of a mile from the library, at the bottom of a hill, is cruel.
American society places selfishness and
individualism above all else.
Next time you arrive to class, sweaty and
breathless, after spending half a day on the freeway to get there, remember
you get what you pay for. |
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